Bob Bennett, Judy Miller’s lawyer, is asking in seeming bewilderment why the staff of the New York Times seems to have turned on Miller, yesterday’s First Amendment heroine.
Well, let’s see if we can help:
Once Miller finally completed the grand jury testimony that she had vowed for 12 weeks that she would never give — and once Judge Thomas Hogan lifted the order holding her in contempt of court — she still refused to cooperate with her Times colleagues trying to report the newspaper’s massive reconstruction of her tale.
Furthermore, on the select occasions upon which she did agree to cooperate, by all available evidence, she prevaricated, vowing, for example, that she had told managing editor Jill Abramson that the Times should look further into the Joseph Wilson-Valerie Plame-CIA leak story — a claim that Abramson categorically denies. No big surprise there; earlier Miller apparently misled Washington bureau chief Phil Taubman when he asked her if she was one of six reporters said to have discussed the Wilson-Plame case with administration officials. Not me, said Miller, fresh from three interviews with Lewis “Scooter” Libby, where she had done just that.
It may be hard for Bennett (or his drama queen of a client) to grasp, but that sort of thing doesn’t sit well with diligent, hardworking journalists all over the country — and all over the Times — who toil away to actually tell their readers what is going on, and who believe there is more to reporting than just stenography.
And so now we get executive editor Bill Keller saying he wishes he had grilled Miller throughout her legal ordeal more assiduously than he did, and affirming to his staff that there is a “contract” between editors and reporters, a contract that “holds that the paper will go to the mat to back up [reporters] institutionally — but only to the degree that the reporter has lived up to his or her end of the bargain … to have been open and candid with the paper about sources, mistakes, conflicts and the like …”
And we get op-ed columnist Maureeen Dowd declaring that if Miller were to return to the Times, the institution in this country most in danger “would be the newspaper you hold in your hands.”
And we get Times public editor Barney Calame reaching this more measured conclusion: ” … the problems facing her inside and outside the newsroom will make it difficult for her to return to the paper as a reporter.”
And we get Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher calling for Miller’s firing.
And we get Josh Marshall, observing that Miller “appears to have been fully honest neither with her readers nor with her employers and editors. And for reasons perhaps better described by novelists and psychologists than journo-ethicists, those supervisors became both her victims and her accomplices, abetting and covering up those sins for years.” (We also get Marshall suggesting that perhaps the Times should rethink its own role as one of the tiny number of media outlets that gets a call whenever a government official wants to plant a story favorable to his or her cause.)
And we get Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times, noting that even the limited and carefully parsed disclosures that Miller has made to her own newspaper are damning. Rutten characterizes Libby’s attempt to plant the Wilson-Plame story with Miller (under the utterly deceptive attribution of former Congressional staffer) thusly:
“Why take the chance of leaving your own fingerprints at the scene of the crime, when the Washington press corps continues to be studded with useful idiots like Miller, who would whack their own grandmothers for a byline above the fold.”
This is, of course, the same Miller who testified to Congress last week in favor of a national shield law for reporters. “… confidential sources, particularly in the national security and intelligence areas, are indispensable to government accountability,” Miller said.
True enough, says Rutten, “but that assumes the confidential sources aren’t behaving like con men and that the reporters involved haven’t signed on as shills to lure the suckers into whatever version of the old shell game the crooks are running this week.”
Frankly, we ‘re conflicted ourselves as concerns the proposed federal law. On one level, the idea of a protection for reporters from showboating prosecutors on fishing expeditions is enticing; on another, it opens the door to something that could be uncomfortably close to governmental licensing of reporters; and on a third, and less important, level, it would, like any blanket law, extend its protections to both rogue reporters and honorable ones.
But Rutten’s point stands: The real tragedy of the Judy Miller case is that, in the eyes of all too many, Miller’s tarnish now rubs off on any cause with which she associates herself.
Steve Lovelady was editor of CJR Daily.